1. Field of the Disclosure
Aspects of the present invention generally relate to a control technique for updating the firmware of an image forming apparatus by remote control.
2. Description of the Related Art
A device management system is conventionally provided for remotely monitoring the operational status of an image forming apparatus, such as a printer and a multifunction peripheral. In recent years, under such an environment of the device management system, the firmware of an image forming apparatus can be updated by remote control.
According to Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2012-59180, a monitoring center host (central management apparatus) receives a firmware download instruction including an update time setting from a service engineer of a vendor, and then the image forming apparatus acquires the instruction from the monitoring center host. Upon reception of the instruction, the image forming apparatus makes an inquiry to a distribution server about whether the firmware can be managed at the time when transmission load is property distributed. When the distribution server manages the firmware, the image forming apparatus downloads and stores the firmware in a hard disk drive (HDD), and performs update processing at a specified execution time.
Updating the firmware is a sensitive work, and thus it should not be performed, or cannot be performed in some states of the device. To solve such an issue, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2006-255955 discusses an image forming apparatus (a printing apparatus) that checks its own operation state and then starts update processing according to a result of the check to rise a success ratio of updating the firmware.
However, as described in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2012-59180, in a case where the image forming apparatus makes the inquiry of the firmware download instruction to the central management device, or performs the firmware update processing at an instruction time specified by a client, updating of the firmware may not be able to be performed in some states of the image forming apparatus. For example, when the image forming apparatus is in a power-off state, or when it is in printing operation or in trouble, the firmware update processing can cause problems. Further, when the image forming apparatus itself cannot notify a monitoring apparatus of an error state, for example, the power-off state, even a cause of failure of the update processing cannot be specified.
According to Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2006-255955, since the image forming apparatus itself controls start of the update processing based on its own operation state, it does not often fail in the update processing due to a problematic state. However, when the image forming apparatus is in the power-off state, obviously, it cannot deal with the update processing.